In The Name Of Science – Manipulating Facebook Users’ Emotions b4in.org/q5MZ The social media universe lit up this weekend with news that Facebook and social scientists from the social network as well as Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco had manipulated news feeds for some 689,000 users without their knowledge or prior specific consent. If you frequent the redOrbit website, you may know that the site wrote about the actual study approximately two weeks ago, detailing the exact nature of the study parameters and the results obtained. Annie-Rose Strasser of ThinkProgress was one of many who provided an inflammatory headline to their readers backed by admittedly well researched privacy concerns supported by experts in the field. Rose Strasser contends the interesting results of the study are marred by one particularly disturbing aspect: None of the participants involved had been explicitly notified of their involvement. When you consider the nature of the study, this is a fair argument. Facebook and the team of social scientists, via an algorithm, manipulated the news feeds of participant users so that some received an increase in so-called negative posts and news stories to their page feed while others were presented with more positive stories to their feed. The team wanted to know the effect, if any, on a user who sees either more positivity or negativity in their social media experience. Facebook was swift in their reply and defense stating, and rightly so, that every Facebook user has agreed to the company’s terms of service which claims user’s data may be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement. Both the university-based social scientists and Facebook claim this study fell within the terms of service agreement because no researcher was presented actual postings by any of the over half million users reviewed for this study. Instead, a Facebook computer program scanned for words considered to be either “positive” or “negative.” “As such, it was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research,” claimed the researchers in their study. More b4in.org/q5MZ
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 18:12:31 +0000
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